Morality, Modern Money, and Climate Mobilization

On July 10, the National Day of Climate Mobilization declared by The Climate Mobilization, I gave a talk about the role of money and morality in effective climate action. The setting was the gymnasium of the St. Robert Catholic School in Sacramento, California. A parishioner at the adjoining St. Robert Church, Vince Valdez, has been spearheading the development of a Climate Mobilization group in Sacramento, in part inspired by Pope Francis’s “Laudatio Si” encyclical.

Though these are really lecture notes and very simple (no graphics), I think this is one possible way to explain the role of morality, politics, and modern money to a non-technical audience. I am careful not to say that morality exactly dictates fiat money creation and destruction but the political representatives of powerful interest groups (like the military industrial complex) need to wrap their various giveaways to defense contractors in terms of the shared moral value of “national defense”. I made this clearer in some of my remarks.

A shift in the hierarchy of moral values as expressed in US politics would need to occur for the return to a full-employment economy in the process of refashioning the energy and land-use basis of our societies. Both the values of full employment for the current generation and climate protection for future generations would need to be expressed more explicitly in the budgeting of the Federal Government and, before then, in the political agitation of groups such as The Climate Mobilization and others.

One Response to Morality, Modern Money, and Climate Mobilization

Dr. Hoexter: Is it true that when the Fed government spends, it simply adds reserve balances to the bank reserve accounts of the targets of the spending, and then the target’s bank marks up the target’ bank account with “real” dollars that the target can spend in the economy? In other words is is true that the Fed gov’t only uses ‘real’ dollars when they create cash that banks order or when the Fed makes a loan to a member bank? Is not the cash and coins the Fed creates plus any Fed loans are the only addition to the money supply, and all the rest of the money supply comes from bank loans?